10 THE TRAFALGAR CHRONICLE If any Continental Navy officer could lay claim to being America’s Horatio Nelson, it was Biddle. Arguably the most accomplished officer in the fledgling colonial fleet, Biddle’s seamanship and courage were beyond question. Washington Irving, best known for ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and the ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, wrote in a biography of Biddle sixty years after Biddle’s and more than thirty after Nelson’s death, that Nelson had warned his Royal Navy colleagues at the onset of the American Revolution that Biddle would be England’s toughest opponent at sea.3 Although Irving never gave the source of Nelson’s warning, if anyone knew Biddle and the American’s abilities, it was Nelson. The two warriors met in 1773 when they served on Captain Constantine Phipps’s (later Lord Mulgrave) expedition to find a passage through the Arctic. Biddle was eight years older than Nelson and already an accomplished mariner. His life to that point had been one in which he surmounted obstacle after obstacle as he worked toward his ultimate goal, which was to serve in the Royal Navy. Biddle was born in Philadelphia on 10 September 1750, the eighth child of William Biddle and Mary Scully.4 Nicholas showed an early predilection to head to sea, like his older brother Charles, who had secured a rate on a merchant vessel thanks to his brother-in-law, William McFunn. Nicholas signed on as a cabin boy at fourteen on the snowAnn and Almack, in which McFunn had a one-third ownership interest and Charles was second mate.5 He spent a year at sea, leaving Philadelphia on 11 October 17646 and returning on 2 September 1765.7 The voyage only whetted Nicholas’s desire for adventure. He signed on for a second cruise and shipped out on 20 October 1765, bound for Jamaica. On 2 January 1766 the snow was in the eastern Caribbean, sailing just off the Northern Triangles, a particularly dangerous chain of reefs, when a gale sprang up, driving the Ann and Almackonto a reef. She stuck fast and the crew abandoned her. A wave carried away the ship’s longboat, leaving just a small yawl in which to escape. McFunn put Nicholas in charge of the crew’s only lifeboat and he calmly had it launched and expertly kept it away from the wrecked snow. ‘He did everything he was ordered with as much coolness as he would have done alongside a wharf,’ his brother said.8 The ten-man crew managed to reach an island eight miles away, where four of them would have to remain, as only six men could fit in the yawl. The crew drew straws to see who would remain behind and Nicholas was one of the four who had to stay.9 The castaways spent thirteen days on the island, surviving on lizards they caught, a bit of ship’s bread and salt pork, and a pool of brackish water.10 Their misery ended 18 January 1766, when Charles Biddle arrived in a small sloop. The brothers remained with
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